One of President Obama’s most frequently repeated talking points, during the ObamaCare crash-and-burn, is that his opponents don’t have any ideas of their own. That is patently false, to a degree the media would simply never accept if he were a Republican pretending the proposals of his Democrat opponents didn’t exist at all.
This false assertion of the President’s is usually followed by a declaration of how incredibly open the great man is to ideas from anyone and everyone. Nobody else has any ideas, mind you – it was a trillion-dollar government takeover of health care, or lovable urchins dropping dead in the streets – but if something were to drift along from outside Obama’s box, why, he would reach right out and grab it, like Thing on the Addams Family.
Rep. Tom Price (R-GA), who is a medical doctor, is a kindly and unassuming one-man wrecking crew for both of these phony Obama talking points. Price has been promoting his own reform plans for years; the current incarnation of his proposal is called the Empowering Patients First Act. In essence, he would accomplish several of the big ObamaCare goals by getting government out of the way. Among other ideas, he wants to remove the silly restrictions against insurance companies competing across state lines, and allow individuals to own their insurance plans, rather than their employers. He actually has a plan to bring people out of Medicaid and into the private insurance market, which is the reverse of how ObamaCare has been working in practice.
Rep. Price is in the middle of a media charm offensive for his Empowering Patients First Act. During a Fox News interview Monday morning, he was asked if President Obama had lived up to his often-repeated promise to entertain alternatives to the malfunctioning Affordable Care Act system.
“We’ve actually called him,” Price replied. “We’ve contacted the White House repeatedly. Silence. It’s crickets.”
Which leads Price to suspect that the President’s real goals have little to do with the quality and affordability of health insurance. “What they want is the government to control health care,” he judged. That would explain how the President and his apologists can look at themselves in the mirror after denying that alternative proposals exist. In their minds, if the alternative doesn’t involve a trillion-dollar Big Government takeover, it’s not addressing the real issue.
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